Logging Makes Our Forests Sustainable
I am unashamedly a logger. When I was a 20-something sun loving California girl, I would never have though that one day I would live in the forest, and love the sound of a chainsaw. Nothing puts a smile on my face faster than the quake of the earth as it hits the ground. I can’t believe it, but I even advocate for the benefits of clearcutting when it comes to supporting wildlife, and improving water resources.
Here are 4 benefits to logging qualifying it as a sustainable practice in agroforestry:
- Improved tree stand health—when logging is done, the older trees that are growing at a slow rate and are more likely to decline due to disease are removed and receive a new life as part of the framework for a family home. Forests are the most amazing “renewable” resource that when managed properly are truly the gift that keeps on giving. If a forest stand is not well cared for, the trees become overgrown and so tightly arranged that the sun cannot reach the soil underneath and so there is little diversity of plants populating the understory. The trees can be so close together, they are like the hair on the back of a dog! This also prevents rain from reaching the soil as much of the rain evaporates off of the thick boughs never benefiting what understory plants do exist. Wildlife has little to no food to graze or browse under unmanaged forest stands.
2. Selectively thinning trees by logging them when the stand becomes too dense helps to reduce competition for soil nutrients and allows the remaining trees to have a greater amount of light and water accessible to them. The understory can become more diverse so that animals will want to come in and eat choice grasses, and underbrush that returns. Wildlife then can improve soil fertility.
3. Logging provides an amazing array of commodities that most people are not aware of. Many chemicals used for medicines and solvents come from trees and we all know the paper, fruit, and wood products that are ubiquitous in our lives. In the year 2018, U.S. employment related to forest products industry was 955,400 people. The total workforce of people who are logging workers is 43,000. That is a lot of family-wage jobs that forestry supports!
4. With lower densities of trees in well managed tree stands, there is a diminished risk of forest fires. Well-managed forests are resistant to insect pests that can kill trees and leave them standing to easily become fire torches when lightening hits. When trees are tightly grown together, forest fires travel across branches that touch and fuels rapidly. Animals have little to no chance of escaping from unmanaged forests that catch fire.
A last benefit that I want to add is that young tree stands are great at carbon sequestration, but old stands where there is little to no growth occurring are as good at carbon sequestration as your wooden dining room table! That, my friends, will have to be a future post.
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